Monday, August 4, 2014

THE EBOLA VIRUS, ACTUAL FACTS BOTH SCARY AND NOT, AND WHY OVERPOPULATION MAY BE TO BLAME.

Ebola is a frightening virus. Basically you get flu-like symptoms, then your body starts to die as your organs boil, with the worst having a 90% fatality rate. This new one seems to have a 70% fatality rate which isn't much better. And because of religious morons. particularly Catholics, who can't see the danger they have been exposing the world to, we may all pay the ultimate price for their idiocy.

There are way too many people on the planet right now. This is seen by our dwindling resources, our ultra-crowded streets and the lack of jobs, good or bad world wide. We humans think we are above nature, that we control it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is, the Catholic Church opposition to abortion and birth control may kill us all and something like the Ebola virus may be the culprit.

We should be expanding abortion clinics and handing our birth control like candy at this point. When a species gets too big for it's environment, nature intervenes, usually through things like sterilization, sex drive declines and, ultimately, disease. The first two have already happened and instead of heading the warning it was, we invented fertility clinics and Viagra, perhaps something even more evil than abortion, as having more children in today's over populated world is a recipe for disaster. The Ebola virus is a firm warning and no one is taking head to what this really means.

But let's clear up some common misconceptions about Ebola. The CDC is receiving death threats about moving the two infected Americans there even though the chance of either patient infecting anyone is roughly zero. They have better facilities and this provides doctors a chance to study the virus much more closely, in real time, and according to some sources, are using an experimental vaccine on the patients which could lead to a vaccine. This is important and worth the tiny risk but as everyone on the Internet is a qualified physician, they of course know better.

Ebola is only spread through close contact with an infected person. The reason it is spreading fast over there is the African nations have poor health care services and cultural norms, like touching the dead at funerals, is making it harder and harder to stop. If it ever got out here, there is little chance of it spreading as we have a much better health care system and quarantines would be a lot easier to establish upon infected individuals. As no one who has Ebola is contagious until symptoms show, and only through close contact even then, this makes it much less to be the pandemic some say it is.

However, that doesn't mean we should ignore this either. Many airlines stopped going to Tel Aviv airport after a single missile landed three miles from the airport. Yet, other than Emirates Air which is the first airline to stop flying to two of the infected countries, no one else sees a problem with taking passengers to and from a hot zone. NO airline should be going there until this things calms down and, may have already seen their first confirmed European causality. Worse, it happened at one of the busiest airports on Earth, Heathrow.

A woman traveling from Sierra Leone collapsed after reaching the UK, "sweating and vomiting." She died soon after. Needless to say, anyone who so much as looked at that plane is peeing themselves blue with even the smallest chance they may have been exposed. Now, we have no idea if the woman died from Ebola or not, (the UK is saying she did not have the disease but they have every reason to lie to not start a panic) but I certainly wouldn't be taking any chances considering where she came from. If we want to stop this from spreading, ending airline traffic to the area would be a smart start.

Now while this strain is not airborne, as there would be a death toll in the millions by now if it was, that doesn't mean Ebola is never airborne. The Reston, Virginia monkey house, immortalized in the book The Hot Zone, showed that an airborne version does exist, only this one only killed monkeys. In humans it was thankfully inert, due to a single chromosome. But research shows that the virus could infect humans with some new strain that could erupt at any time. It could mutate in human, which is not likely, or, it could mutate in pigs and spread to humans and/or monkeys, as tests have shown is possible. A study done in 2012 demonstrated that Ebola could start in pigs and spread, by air, into nearby monkeys. It is unknown from this study whether humans would be affected or immune like the Reston case. The facts are, somewhere lurking out in the jungle is a form of Ebola that is airborne and is lethal to humans. And if we stumble across it, we will be living a real life Outbreak scenario where 90% of the world dies within six months. Fun.

The reason for this is there are so many people on the planet that are going into areas of the planet we were never meant to. And nature's way of correcting that imbalance at this point is a culling by means of a plague, one we are inadvertently creating. No one wants to talk about population control as anyone who does gets compared to Hitler two seconds later. But the facts are we are dangerously close to the end and if we don't start making some hard choices, there won't be any humanity left.

On a personal note, I may not be able to post anything until Sunday as I have been hired to do some research on the Ebola virus for a scientist friend. I have studied the Ebola virus for twenty five years now and have amassed a lot of research on this. He wants me to go through some of what I have and do some statistical analysis on projections for a world wide epidemic and what would entail survival rates. Sounds like fun and I will be busy. August is usually slow, but not for me, so if you don't hear from me until the weekend, know that I am knee deep in the Ebola virus. Wow, that sounds gross.